NVIDIA’s invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined modern computer graphics, and revolutionized parallel computing. More recently, GPU deep learning ignited modern AI – the next era of computing – with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots, and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world. Velodyne’s partnership with NVIDIA enables accelerated development of next-generation lidar-enabled autonomous solutions powered by the NVIDIA® Jetson™ platform. Jetson systems provide the performance and power efficiency to run Edge AI applications for autonomous machines faster and with less power.
Autonomous solutions can do more than just perform tasks. They can learn, adapt and evolve using capabilities like machine learning, computer vision, navigation and more. NVIDIA Jetson systems use the power of deep learning to drive the new era of autonomous solutions.
One use case example is the NVIDIA Carter Robot platform which is a robot developed as a platform to demonstrate the capabilities of the Isaac SDK. The platform is based on a differential drive and uses lidar, including Velodyne’s sensors, and a camera to perceive the world.
Isaac is NVIDIA’s open platform for intelligent robots. The Isaac SDK provides a large collection of powerful GPU-accelerated algorithm GEMs for navigation and manipulation. The Isaac SDK Engine is a framework to easily write modular applications and deploy them on a real robot. Isaac SDK comes with various example applications from basic samples that show specific features to applications that facilitate complicated robotics use cases. Isaac SDK also works hand-in-hand with the Isaac SIM simulation platform, which allows for development, testing and training of robots in a virtual environment.
NVIDIA Jetson is a leading AI-at-the-edge computing platform. Each Jetson system is a complete System-on-Module, with CPU, GPU, PMIC, DRAM and flash storage – saving development time and money. Jetson is also extensible, enabling developers to build custom systems around their specific needs.
